Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

Last month, I introduced Segoe UI , the new user interface font for Office 12 and Windows Vista. Of course, you spend most of your time in Office not looking at the user interface, but working with documents. Times New Roman has been Word's...

On Tuesday , I mentioned some of the barriers I see to people using help regularly in Office. Based on the comments, I can tell that many of you have strong feelings about the Office help system. The team that owns the help system has read your...

A comment we've heard again and again about the Office 12 interface after people use it or see it demoed live is: "wow, it's so much better than I imagined just by seeing the screenshots." Several people made that comment to me once again after my...

Last week I started a new series of some of my favorite new features in Office 12. If you're curious what criteria I'm using to select them, read Part 1 . Today's episode: You're standing up on stage in front of a thousand people who have...

I received a mail this weekend responding to my Friday post on Super Tooltips asking a simple question: "It seems like you introduce every new feature in Office 12 with a code name. Why not use the 'real' name?" The short answer is: "Because...

Due to the holidays here in the United States and elsewhere, many people are taking time off of work, away from their computers, and away from blogs. I am no exception, and my blog will be on hiatus for two weeks. If you're new to the blog and...

One of the features I always wished Word had was the ability to alphabetize a list of words. I always copied my words into Excel, fixed them up one per row, sorted them there, and then pasted back into Word. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that...

Today, I'm starting an ongoing series on some of my favorite things in Office 12. Maybe you'll hear marketing talk about some of these features down the road and maybe you won't; I'm not really concerned about that. The only criteria I...

Here's a neat time-saver in Excel 12. Let's say that you have some numbers somewhere in the Excel grid, in this case monthly sales figures for the branches of a store: Sales data in the Excel grid Now, let's say I wanted to quickly find out the...

A big thanks to everyone who came to hear me speak last night at the BayCHI monthly program at PARC . I enjoyed meeting so many of you in person and hearing your feedback and ideas. Thanks especially to Rashmi, Deanna, Suzanne, Steve, and everyone...

Tonight I'll be in Palo Alto, CA, speaking at the monthly meeting of BayCHI in PARC's George E. Pake Auditorium . I'll be discussing the ideas behind the redesign of Office and showing demos of Office 12 Beta 1. The full description of the talk is...

One of the major engineering feats associated with shipping Office is making sure it runs fast enough. This effort, which we classify under the broad heading of "performance" includes responsiveness (how quickly a button responds when you click...